


Expectations

by Ships_ahoy



Category: Homestuck
Genre: First Meetings, Fluff, Long Distance Relationship, M/M, i just have a lot of feelings i needed to vent out, slightly nsfw at times?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-17
Updated: 2014-04-17
Packaged: 2018-01-19 16:54:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1477084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ships_ahoy/pseuds/Ships_ahoy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is purely a short fluffly fic about Dirk and Jake meeting for the first time after dating online, and how not everything is how they possibly expected it to be. A simple homage to everyone who has met friends/partners/whoever in person after so long and had to conquer the fear and nerves that came with it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Expectations

**Author's Note:**

> Listening to [Ghibli music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHina6WfiIY) puts me in such fluffy moods when writing.

When you’d imagined meeting him at the airport, it had always been the same. He’d run through the doors and you’d spread your arms wide for him, bury your smile in his hair whilst he clung to the back of your shirt. Maybe he’d smell like burnt caramel to match the tan of his skin, or fresh like the outdoors and newly cut grass as green as his eyes. You’d drive him to your apartment, and you’d spend the evening making up for all those times you wanted to touch but couldn’t. You’d kiss, and hold, and count his eyelashes until there wasn’t an inch of him you were a stranger to.

So many expectations. 

The reality was that he’d grown up isolated on an island, and you had more intimacy issues to share between the both of you.

When he came through the airport arrival doors, he tries to run, but his bootlaces are untied and he falls flat on his face with his backpack riding up to hit him in the head. You help him up, but the contact is brief and you find that you’re too nervous to hug him. He pulls you against him all the same, and by the time you remember to wrap your arms back around him, you realize he smells like cheap airplane food and something musty you couldn’t quite place. The picture perfect greeting slips through your shaking fingers and you can’t control it no matter how hard you try.

You’re both simply too awkward and embarrassed. 

In the car ride home, you recall everything you ever typed out to him over pesterchum, the promises you’d made to love him, the suggestions of what the two of you could do when he came to Texas, and you flush. To look across to him in the passenger seat, and see him _really there_ with his shirt all creased from travelling, his dark hair a mess and his smile just as nervous as you felt… The words are all caught on your tongue. You should have kissed him at the airport. It’s too hot, and the buzz of the car air con helps fill the silence only slightly, and you’ve only spoken to ask him how his flight was, and _fuck_.

Jake seems to have found his courage a little more than you have by the time you reach your apartment, because he’s talking a lot. He sounds the same as what he does over video calls, except without the crackly interference of a cheap microphone, and you want to sink into his voice and kiss him with every syllable and breathy little laugh he makes. You want to tell him that you meant every word you typed to him, that you’re so happy to have him here finally after almost a year of dating online. You want to do so much, but your fingers are still shaking a little, and when you ask if he wants something to drink, you stammer just slightly. If he notices, he doesn’t point it out, but only sends you a smile to break hearts and asks for a glass of milk.

Things will get better, they have to.

That evening he sleeps in your bed and you take the couch instead, and you’ve barely touched apart from that brief hug which you’re fairly sure was too tense to count. You bury your face into the pillow in the dark and try not to scream, swearing that you’ll do better tomorrow. 

Maybe this was how everyone felt when meeting their boyfriend for the first time? Terrified and a nervous wreck despite all best attempts to remain detached and cool about it all. You’d always thought that things would just come as easy as green and orange text flying back and forth across a computer screen. You were capable of wit and sarcasm as if they were a second nature to you, but it seemed that in person the words always got messed up on your tongue, or you mumbled them too quietly in an accent that he couldn’t quite understand. Things were stilted and jerky, like driving over too many speed bumps on what was normally a straight, open road. By the second night, you prayed to whatever deity was out there that Jake wouldn’t simply pack his bags and leave again now that he knew how hideously _bad_ at all this you really were.

On the third day, you take him to the zoo, because you know he likes the animals. Words come a little easier now, and you don’t turn beet red every time he so much as looks at you. He still sends your heart hammering, but it’s in a different way to before, a better way. A way in which it feels a little less like a panic attack and a little more like the love you know you really felt for him. He makes you try on all the stupid animal ear headbands in the gift shop until you snap and try to take a photo on your phone of him wearing a pair of elephant ears. You chase him around the shop three times until he accidentally knocks over a display of plush lions and you both run from the shop guilty and holding back laughter. 

It’s dark inside the aquarium, but he looks so beautiful in the blue glow coming from the tanks, his nose practically pressed to the glass and his grin wide. You shuffle closer, and fingers brush up against each other in a way that has you frozen stock still, the hairs on the back of your neck standing on end. He’s barely noticed, rambling on about the jellyfish in the tank and how he saw one the size of his leg back on his island. You look down to his hand, and you think you might be hyperventilating, but you go for it all the same, making him stammer to a halt when you grip his hand in your own.

You’re holding on too tight, and you both have sweaty palms. He’s blushing when you glance back up, just a faint shade of darker skin through the tint of your shades, but it’s okay because he squeezes your hand just gently and your breathing calms again. You inch your fingers between his own, interlocking them together so that you can pull him along to look at the other animals on display.

That night he invites you to sleep in the bed with him. You put on some music to keep you both company, sitting on one end of the bed and watching him strip down to his boxers by the other. 

“I like this song,” he tells you with a smile, and you quip back a joke that rolls so easy off your tongue this time around. The way he laughs makes your chest swell, and you’ve never wanted to kiss him more than right then. You’re not quite there yet, though, and the need is released on a shaky exhale, hands reaching to pull your own shirt over your head.

When you lie down beside him, half covered in bedsheets and feeling more exposed than you’d ever been to anyone, he eases your nerves with his stories and jokes, his accent hushed in the dark and everything about him a stark contrast to yourself. He was soft and tan, with dimples in his cheeks when he smiled and dark hair curling around his ear and against his neck. You were made of sharper features, not a hair out of place and skin as white as milk bottles. He’s smaller than you expected, but it works out better when he decides to finally fall asleep curled up against your chest.

Just before he drifts off, he tells you that you have pretty eyes. You give a quiet chuckle into his hair and wrap an arm around him to keep him close.

Things might not be what you expected, but it gets easier every day. 

The fourth day it rains, and you both silently decide that a lazy day was needed. Or maybe it’s just because you’d both woken up face to face with tangled limbs, and it had been nice to see him smile before you saw anything else that day. To have gotten so close without messing it up or saying something dumb, neither of you wanted to spoil it by suggesting breakfast or leaving the bed to get dressed. So you lay with him for a few more hours, tracing gentle circles onto his bare back with your fingertips, soaking in his warmth and talking about movies and comics, and what Jane and Roxy might be up to just then. Somehow, you both end up whispering rather than talking, as if scared to disturb the sound of rain hitting your window.

Even when you’d managed to pull yourselves out of bed, you barely stay an arm’s reach away from each other. You weren’t so scared of touching anymore, not with Jake, and you almost hated the way you craved it now. What would happen when he left again? How would you cope knowing you had to wake up every day and not have a pair of tired green eyes staring back at you?

You make breakfast at lunchtime, you spend the day showing him all the robotics you’d been working on, and you let him choose which movies to watch when you retire to the couch afterwards. He curls his legs up to his chest and leans heavily against your side in a way which makes you happier than you’ve felt in a long time. The movie he picks is shitty, as always, and you don’t hesitate to tell him so, but when he looks your way to start arguing his case, you find it’s just the right time to lean in and kiss him. He tastes like warm toothpaste from earlier, and his lips are a little chapped, but that’s okay. It was a first kiss several days late, several months late even, and it was sweeter than you ever could have imagined. 

Things are awkward and movements are clumsy at first, but Jake seems just as determined as you are to figure it out, and with a few head tilts and experimental motions of lips, you think you work it out between you. His breath is warm when he exhales against your mouth, and you can feel him smile when you bite at his lower lip, your hand resting against his jaw just to keep your fingers from shaking. His skin heats up when you brush your thumb over his cheek, and when you break, he laughs softly. 

“Well, I never expected kisses would be quite so good, if I do say so myself.”

“I know, I’m pretty fuckin’ amazing at it, ain’t I?” A cocky smirk earns you a playful punch to the arm, and you kiss him again just to watch his cheeks flare red in that way you couldn’t get enough of. 

On that fourth night you lie in bed beside one another and the energy is altered this time around. It’s tense and scary, but entirely different to the nerves of first meeting Jake. The rain had long since ceased outside, and it was just you and him in the dark, breathing slow and loud in time with the ticking of your bedside clock. You don’t joke and talk like you had done the night before, but rather communicate with gentle touches made under the cloak of the bedsheet. You slide a hand along his waist, feel his legs bump up against your own before they tangle together and drag your hips close. His hand was in your hair, stroking through blond strands with fingers clumsy with nerves. 

His lips seem like a warm, soft relief in the dark, and this time you get to taste his tongue and his cheek, and jaw, and neck…

You leave your marks wherever you can get your lips and teeth against him, because you want everyone to know that this beautiful boy was all yours, and because you adore the way his breath hitches under each bite. The fingers in your hair give gentle tugs now, and he pulls you back to his lips for a different kind of kiss, leaving you breathless and needy, having your hips drive forward to meet Jake’s own. 

He’s never looked more wonderful when lying underneath you, green eyes hazed and lips pink from kissing. You both explore exposed skin with desperate hands and mouths, and when you find a rhythm of moving together, it’s not long before you hear him moan and groan in ways which you just had to catch on your tongue with another kiss. You cum with his name on your lips and a sense that you’d rather be nowhere else in the world but there with him, bare and trusting, messy in the aftermath of intimacy. 

“I love you.”

This time the words don’t stutter at all, and they sound more real than they’d ever looked on screen. He simply snorts out a laugh and messes up your hair with his hand. 

“I love you too, Strider.”

The next three days are spent in bliss, and you wish you’d had the courage to be with Jake like this as soon as he’d stepped off the plane. You take him to the movies, to the coffee shop, to the games arcade. You attempt to cook with him, then order takeout when your pizza burns. You kiss him every single chance you get, because you know that you’re running out of time, and you want to remember his taste and touch for as long as you can. You wrestle with him, laugh at his complaints when you slip a hand down the back of his shorts, and soon find yourself pinned to the floor with him on your lips in the most satisfying way. You love him so much, and you tell him so with complete earnest honesty, in a way that makes him laugh and scold you for looking so serious. 

But you can’t say it enough, there’s not enough time, and soon you’re back at the airport once more, but it’s not the same. He hugs you, and you bury into his neck to kiss at the hickeys you’d left behind until he pushes you away because it tickles. It hurts to see him smile just before he leaves, and you want to tell him not to go, to stay for longer so that you could spend another few hundred days in bed together with hushed words over the sound of rain. But if anything, you’d learned not to expect things like that to happen, as they never did. 

“Come back soon, or I might actually start missin’ ya.”

“You’re missing me already, chap, admit it.”

He laughs, and kisses you one last time before moving away to catch his plane. He’s right, you miss him already, and it takes everything to stop you running after him like some lovestruck fool out of a movie. In your pocket, a quiet buzz alerts you of a new message, and you take it out to open it up. 

_‘Next time you should fly out to me. As soon as you start to really miss me too much! <3’_

You expect you’ll see him again very soon.


End file.
